The Streaks Update Is Late — Here's Why

Five weeks ago I ended a post with Next week: streaks. The Streak Explorer changes were the next thing on the list, and I was confident enough to put a date on them.

That date came and went, and so did four more weeks. The changes still aren't live, and I'd rather say so plainly than hope nobody noticed. If you've been checking back for them: sorry. That's on me for promising a week when I hadn't looked closely enough at what else was coming.

Here's what's in the way, and why I think it's the right order, even though it doesn't feel like it from where you're sitting.

First: making the site easier to find

Most of you arrive here from a search. Once people land, they stay, explore and come back, which is the part I care about most. But the site doesn't show up often enough for the people who'd find it useful, so I've spent the last few weeks on groundwork that helps search engines understand what's here.

There isn't much to say about it in detail, and most of it you'll never see directly. The short version: better pages for clubs, competitions and rivalries, and clearer links between them. It isn't glamorous, but it's the work that decides whether the next person looking for a team's unbeaten run ever finds this place.

Next: German, French, Italian and Spanish

This is the bigger one, and the one I'm genuinely looking forward to. In the next three to four weeks the site will be available in German, French, Italian and Spanish, alongside English.

A good share of you already come from those countries, and the leagues this site covers best are their leagues. Reading about the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga or Ligue 1 in your own language shouldn't be an afterthought, and translating everything properly takes time.

It also has to come before the streaks work, not after. Every page I change now is a page I'd otherwise have to translate twice. Doing the languages first means the Streak Explorer improvements arrive once, in five languages, rather than in English with the others catching up later.

What hasn't changed

The streaks plan is the same one I described: making the page easier to use rather than making it do more. It came from a reader, it still reads as obviously right, and it's still next in line once the languages are out. I'm just not going to put a week on it this time.

In the meantime, the Streak Explorer works exactly as before, and everything you could filter last month you can still filter today.

Tell me what you'd change

Most of the improvements on this site started as messages from people using it, and that hasn't changed either. If there's something in the Streak Explorer you'd like to see while it's on the bench, a language I've missed, or anything else that's clumsy or missing, SmartSoccerStats@gmail.com reaches me and I read all of it. Now is actually a good time: anything that arrives before the streaks work starts can go straight into it.

Thanks for your patience. See you in the data.